Director Brad Bird has revealed that Paramount Pictures‘ next installment of the Mission: Impossible Spy-Fi franchise, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, part of which was filmed in IMAX, will be hitting IMAX theaters five days prior to its release in traditional theaters.

Bird told the LATimes,

“The two things that movies have that you can’t get anywhere else are really big screens and an audience… I feel like multiplexes and the shutting down of the grand old theaters have taken a lot of the showmanship out of presenting movies. There used to be a thing such as ‘first run.’ The meaning of ‘first run’ is gone now because on opening day you can see a brand new movie on a good screen but it’s more likely you’ll see it on a crappy screen. And it can even be a small, crappy screen. It used to be that when a movie opened, if you wanted to see it early, you had to see it great. To me, the best example of showmanship now is IMAX. I pushed to shoot in IMAX, and Paramount went along with me, so we filmed a good chunk of this movie in IMAX, which is a pain in the butt. The cameras are big and they’re noisy. But the image quality – you can’t get that any other way… you really feel it when it’s in IMAX. Maybe one of these days I’ll get to do a whole film that way.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-8AZlVrY5k[/youtube]

Synopsis:

Director Brad Bird and Producer J.J. Abrams bring us the action packed, entertainment event of the holiday season with MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL.

The new film in the series, which has grossed $2 billion dollars worldwide, will feature a new team: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg.

This is not just another mission.

The IMF is shut down when it’s implicated in a global terrorist bombing plot. Ghost Protocol is initiated and Ethan Hunt and his rogue new team must go undercover to clear their organization’s name. No help, no contact, off the grid. You have never seen a mission grittier and more intense than this.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL, directed by Brad Bird and starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Josh Holloway, Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Lea Seydoux and Anil Kapoor is slated to hit IMAX theaters on December 16th, 2011 and traditional theaters on December 21st, 2011.